I took several slow, deep breaths to increase my lung capacity and upsurge the amount of oxygen in my blood. Then, while mouthing the words, I counted to three and sent my right foot viciously into the door.
Seventeen
Mayflower Hotel
Friday, March 28
Nihayat al’ayam plus 17 hours, 5 minutes
The hardest part about kicking a door isn’t the breaching act itself. In fact, the brute-force portion is purely mechanical, based on physics and largely unsophisticated.
First, attempt to find the weakest portion on the door, typically located near the handle or locking mechanism. Then, drive the foot heel into it with enough forward energy to dislodge it or otherwise shatter it or the surrounding frame. All the while resisting the urge to utilize action movie stunts like the tough-guy shoulder barge or the Bruce Lee–inspired jumping side-kick. If the door opens inwardly away from the kicker and the ensuing strike, you’re golden. If it opens outward toward the kick, it’s a hair trickier and requires more force. But it is still achievable—especially for the well tenured. The one thing you don’t want to do is have to kick a door more than once. You might not get a chance at the second effort, depending on who or what’s waiting for you on the other side.
No. By far, the hardest part about kicking in a door is the anticipation—of what lies behind it. I think that holds true for most things, though, with regard to anticipation. I prefer knowing to not knowing, and completing tasks over waiting to find out. The waiting tends to offer far too much time to think.
I’ve performed this technique damned near a thousand times throughout my career, and discovered anything from a traditional Jewish family quietly reciting a customary brachah rishonah before dinner to a full house of teenage bomb-building, Galil rifle-toting, ready and willing to meet Allah jihadists on the other side, each responding dutifully in their own appropriate manner to my spontaneous intrusion.
The double doors leading into our suite opened inwardly and were secured by what appeared to be a formidable brass keypad and lockset in their intermediate. A piece of fucking cake.
After I forced my heel into the door and turned the door jamb leading into the presidential suite into splinters, the scene that surrounded me went into slow motion. I immediately identified four threats in our suite, three of them huddled together at twelve o’clock, approximately eight yards away in the marble-floored living area. One was casually seated with two others standing on either side of him, and both were armed with silenced rifles.
A fourth stood to my left, just inside the hall leading to the walk-in closet space, his silenced pistol aimed at the door, and at me.
Entering the oval-shaped foyer, I immediately went low and left and saw Natalia flash past me to my right. She’d gone even lower than me and dove directly behind the cover of the plaster wall between the foyer and the hall leading into the living area, the Grach pistol leading her way.
As I targeted the man hiding in the closet, it took all of a millisecond to surmise that his weapon was still trained on me while I moved. I dove to the ground, landing on my right side, and snapped the trigger on my Glock 19 twice, placing two shots into his midsection. Crimson blood soaked through his shirt from his torso and blew out of his back in a fine mist. He dropped like a lead balloon. Must’ve forgotten his body armor. He wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
I rolled and allowed my momentum to carry me to the wall adjacent to Natalia, then rose as fast as my body would allow and made eye contact with her. She held up an index finger, and I nodded to her. A split second later, she vaulted out from cover and fired two blazingly fast shots, moving back behind the wall seconds after, her reflexes and agility as fierce and catlike as I’d ever seen them. She was a predator in her element, and her most recent injury wasn’t slowing her down in the least.
Natalia and I stepped forward into the hall in parallel and approached the final man, the only remaining threat still alive in our suite. His two fellow sentinels had been armed with modified and suppressed Kalashnikov pistols of some variety, from what I could tell, but he didn’t appear to be armed.
Several unsuppressed shots had rung out in this hotel today, and that meant it wouldn’t be long before we’d be getting a visit from local law enforcement. With three deceased men in our suite and a fourth most likely getting ready to join them, we needed to make quick work of this and take our leave posthaste.
I stood back and surveyed the scene, making sure to keep a close eye on our foe’s hands. I kept constant pressure on the trigger, ready to pull it at a second’s notice if he so much as twitched in a threatening manner.
Natalia simply lowered her weapon and daringly approached him. His face offered no emotion, no sentiment with regard to recent events. She began speaking to him in a foreign dialect sounding awfully a lot like Russian. After a moment, his face softened a bit, and he began conversing openly with her.
The back-and-forth lasted all of about two minutes. Nearing the end, the man had begun to smile and nod and say the word tak repeatedly, which I knew to be the Ukrainian word for ‘yes’. It was at that point I realized they hadn’t been speaking Russian at all, and these men had most certainly been tied to the same crew we’d met on the street earlier.
The conversation ended abruptly when Natalia palmed a thick down pillow from the chair and a half to her right and placed it over the man’s face. She shoved the Grach pistol into the pillow and fired two muffled shots, sending a cloud of feathers soaring onto the chair and into the thick layer of blood now covering the back side of it.
With all threats neutralized, my mind spinning, and my body slowly failing from exhaustion, I lowered my weapon and watched his arms fall to his sides and his body go limp.
Natalia dropped the bloody pillow into his lap and casually slipped the Grach inside the rear waistband of her leggings. She concealed it with her jacket, then turned to me. “Q, we…can never come back here again. Okay?”
“The hotel?”
She shook her head. “No, the city. Washington.”
I nodded avowal with a bit of hesitation. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with her—I did. I just wanted more of an explanation. I needed more of an explanation. But I knew just as much as my wife did, we’d been running on borrowed time for going on far too long. And now it appeared we’d downright run out of it.
“Let’s get packed and get out of here, now. Grab only what you need, and don’t leave anything behind they can use to track us.”
“I know the drill, Q,” she said exhaustedly.
“I’ll get us a car. We can head to one of the safe houses for the remainder of the night,” I said. “I’m sorry…I’d take us farther…but I’m just too tired to go on a long road trip tonight.”
“Fine. Tomorrow morning, then. First thing.”
“Tomorrow morning, it is.”
Eighteen
Fairfax County, Virginia
Saturday, March 29
Nihayat al’ayam plus 1 day, 6 hours, 43 minutes
Comfortable silence. It was a foundation I had grown to both recognize and appreciate whenever Natalia and I were alone with one another. It was a class of armistice that I had never known to be conceivable until the point I had met her.
Before in my past involvements, no matter how significant or paltry, I had always distinguished the opposite. And it didn’t matter whom I was with, mere acquaintance, friend, companion, lover, or otherwise. Silence, as the idiomatic phrase goes, was indeed deafening, and oftentimes had a way of making me feel uncomfortable and somewhat on edge, but never with her. At least, not until today.
Last evening, following our little Hopak with a quartet of Ukrainian hatchet men, we had vacated our suite in rapid fashion, taking only the bare necessities along with us for the ride. No less than thirty minutes later, we had arrived at a safe house just outside the capital beltway and had remained there until just before daybreak this morning.
With all the attention we’d b
een getting, it had become necessary to abandon the Audi, and after a bit of searching, I had found a suitable replacement in the hotel’s underground garage. After removing a few sets of keys from the valet’s unsecured key box, I chose a pitch-black, late-model GMC Yukon XL Denali, a four-wheel-drive beast of an SUV decked out with leather, a sunroof, and limo-tinted windows. There were so many of these things being sported around town these days by white-collar commuters, politicians, dignitaries, and so on, its presence on DC’s streets would be like swimming with the current.
At the point of acquiring it, I considered two distinct drawbacks. Boosting this thing could very easily put us on the radar, but there wasn’t enough time to go through another rental process, and we were in a bit of a hurry. The second drawback was the myriad of surveillance provisions that car manufacturers tended to install in them, unbeknownst to their end users. Modern-day vehicles these days came not only fully equipped with an overabundance of computerized everything, but with a full complement of electronic countermeasures. Along with all the selling-point premium features, such as three-hundred-sixty-degree collision avoidance, moisture-sensing windshield wipers, and high-performance audio and speakers, were an assortment of microphones, exterior and interior cameras, cellular transceivers, and not just one, but several global positioning satellite transponders.
They’ll tell you the premise behind all these gadgets is benign, being nothing more than for the purpose of driver and passenger safety. But what they don’t tell you, and won’t tell you, is that the vehicle is basically one big overpriced spy transmitter. It’s capable of listening in to everything you say, watching everything you do, and seeing everywhere you’re going, and even tracking you—with astounding accuracy—wherever you are.
If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was being spied on, tracked or traced, and Natalia shared the sentiment. So I spent a bit of time disabling the Denali’s ability to do so. I decided to target the antenna systems, knowing that after disabling them, any data attempting to transmit couldn’t escape the cannister.
During the surgical procedure, I was amazed to find the vehicle even had secondary antenna systems installed as backup. Those options must now come standard in this model…I’m guessing the manufacturer failed to provide that noteworthy data on the factory sticker, though.
Natalia was seated in the passenger seat, staring out the window with her bare feet pressed against the dash. She was becoming fond of the Denali’s heated seats, which she had cranked all the way up to the incineration setting. I had mine set about midway, and it was doing a respectable job of melting away some of my aches while leaving the residual stress to remain.
Though the two of us had gotten a decent amount of sleep last night and were both very much awake, it had been silent in the passenger compartment since the point we’d left the safe house this morning. And it was officially the first time I had felt uncomfortable in that silence.
As I weaved the lengthy SUV through the crowded two-lane highway and backed-up intersections, I glanced over at Natalia from the corner of my eye whenever I could, to check if she was still with me. She had her left hand on her knee, taking care not to move her injured arm too often. Her right was taking turns combing through her hair and travelling to her mouth so she could nibble on her fingernails.
Just when I was about to say something to her, Natalia rearranged her seating position and faced me. She crossed her legs, one on top of the other, and tossed her hair over a shoulder. “Q, talk to me. Is everything okay?”
Took the words right out of my mouth. But were we ready to discuss all this? I glanced over. “Yeah. Everything’s fine, as far as I can tell.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I shrugged. “Tell me why you’re asking, and I’ll tell you if I’m sure.”
She leaned in closer, adjusting her seatbelt for some added give. “I’m asking…because you look preoccupied.”
“I do?”
Natalia nodded her head fervently. “Yes, you do. And it’s…strange. It’s not like you.”
“Why?”
“Because you never look preoccupied.”
I was ready to respond, but the last look she sent me told me she wasn’t done yet.
Natalia fidgeted with her hair. “Q, you’re a rock. Most days, you’re harder than granite. I’ve seen you turn a building into a human slaughterhouse and strut out the front door covered head to heels in blood, with your shirt hanging over your shoulder, without a care in the world. Normally, you give off the air of a cyborg. What’s different about today?”
What was different about today? I couldn’t believe she was asking after all we’d discussed and witnessed thus far since our journey to the States had kicked off. Maybe the time had come to just air it all out. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the fact we somehow got pawned into hitting the big red button that initiated World War Three. And the more I think about it, the more it bothers me. I mean, seriously, why us? I know what Ammar said—the op was meant to be clandestine, no ties leading back to him or his handlers. But if that were one hundred percent true, then why is the damn agency onto us?”
Natalia cocked her head. Her neck craned backward, and her brow furrowed. “Wait. What are you talking about?”
I sighed. I must have failed to mention it, either by accident or on purpose. The evening had been moderately eventful. “After we exposed our tails and went split city, I took out my shadow. Then I had a little run-in with an old friend.”
“What sort of old friend?” she asked, a slight edge in her voice. “The kind who works for the CIA?”
I nodded.
“Who?”
“An old-school peckerhead case officer. Someone I never got along well with and would’ve loved to have forgotten a long time ago.”
“So the CIA knows we’re here?”
“Yeah.” I pulled the plastic bag of narcotics and antibiotics Prosser had given me from my pocket and tossed them to her. “But that’s not all they know.”
Natalia eyeballed the pills a moment, then stared at me, her pupils alight. “And who do we have to thank for that? Your buddy the drunk, I presume?”
I shook my head. “No. Jonathan would never offer up that kind of intel on us, especially to the agency. My guess…is that we were identified by software, by some camera somewhere along the way.”
“Facial recognition, you mean.”
“We’ve been moving about undisguised along the busiest streets in one of the busiest metropolitan areas in the land of Big Brother.”
“Yeah…but then again, let us not neglect to mention the fucking airport we were flown into.” Natalia sighed. “I take it this will only serve to further complicate things.”
“It’s too soon to tell,” I said. “Prosser called it a brush pass—like an agent making brief contact with an asset. But most brush passes don’t incorporate sniper overwatch.”
“Jesus. He had someone put in place to take you out?”
“Maybe. But I reckon deterrence was his primary purpose in being there.”
“To keep you from killing Prosser?” Natalia asked.
“Do you blame him?”
“Bearing in mind your track record? No.” A pause. “So they know about my arm. Then they know about the raid on el-Sattar…”
“It’s safe to assume they know everything, especially now.”
“Dammit. No wonder you’re preoccupied.”
“Yeah, it’s bugging me,” I said. “Add to it the fact that we’re now being tracked by the Ukrainians, for whatever reason. I’m sorry…recent events, tangled with you almost getting killed…I guess my nerves are just a little shot.”
Natalia opened the plastic bag and extracted two cephalexin caplets, popped them in her mouth, and swallowed them down short of a chaser. Afterward, she didn’t say anything, even though I was hoping she would. I really needed her to explain what had happened back there. For the moment though, I had no other choice than to wait for her and allow
the aspects of our encounter with the Ukrainian hit squad to add even more obscurity to our conundrum.
After a few minutes, I decided to break the silence using a sobriquet I’d only ever used to grasp her attention during times when I’d felt forsaken. “Nati?”
A moment passed before her reply came in a velvety purr. “Yeah, Q?”
“Who were they?”
Natalia had been hanging her head, and it took a few seconds for her to acknowledge my question. She looked up at me with tender eyes. “I just knew you were going to ask me that.”
“Did you think after all that action, I’d forget about it?”
“No. I knew you wouldn’t forget, and I knew at some point I needed to brief you.” She paused. “And I’m going to. You just have to promise not to freak out on me.”
“I’ll try not to. But no promises.” This wasn’t good.
Natalia hesitated a long moment while a distressing smile crept across her lips. “They were sent here by some old colleagues of mine. A particular faction who at one time looked upon me as family. I haven’t seen or heard from them in a very long time and, honestly, never thought I would.” She paused extensively. “Do you remember our first night in Berchtesgaden? It was a few days before we bought our flat. We got hammered on Glühwein and took a really long walk, and somehow ended up going for a swim in der Königssee?”
“Of course. I would have frozen my ass off in that lake if I hadn’t nearly drowned in it. Lucky for me, I had you as my lifeguard that night.”
Natalia chuckled. “Yeah. And that was just the shallow end. I remember a lot of riveting details about that night, but one stands out in particular. It was the first time I told you about Dmitry.” A long pause followed. “The men we encountered, all of them…are here because of him. They were sent by Orloff. Dmitry’s oldest son.”
I glanced over. “Are they looking to retrieve you for a family reunion?”
Until Nothing Remains: A Hybrid Post-Apocalyptic Espionage Adventure (A Gun Play Novel: Volume 1) Page 19
